After news had just spread of Microsoft's decision to make their Virtual PC software free for download, competitor "VMware" are keeping the pressure on, having just announced that they too have started offering their powerful VMware server virtualization platform as a freebie.

The DailyTech report.

VMware today announced that its venerable virtualization platform, VMware Server, is now available free of charge. VMware is making the virtualization platform free after five vigorous months of beta testing. The company says that its technology is tried and true, and used by many of today's top companies. According to the press release:

Users can easily progress from VMware Server to VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of the industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software suite that allows entire industry-standard infrastructure farms to be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or projects. The suite is designed to deliver comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities in an integrated offering.